Free Lightless by C.A. Higgins Page A

consciousness, Althea pulled herself slowly out of her trance, as if waking from a dream.
    The hall was empty and quiet. The sound that had triggered her attention was not to be heard.
    Still she sat and listened.
    Althea knew all the sounds of her ship. Althea knew what the ship sounded like when she was well and what she sounded like when she was ill, and she could diagnose her from the sound, the feel of her parts.
    This sound was not a sound she had heard before.
    It started as a scratching, faint, weak, but foreign to her ship, a scratching like nails scrabbling for purchase. It was too distant to define exactly, but Althea thought it had to be the sound of metal scratching lightly against metal.
    She rose to her feet and walked over to the part of the wall where the scratching sounds originated and laid her hand against the wall.
    Something creaked inside the ship where Althea knew that nothing should creak. She leaned closer, pressing her head against the pipes and wires that covered the surface of the wall, her hair snagging on the rivets—
    And then the sound was moving. Althea chased it, moving close to the wall, her palms brushing over the odd curves of the
Ananke
as she followed the sound up the hallway, her mind racing.
    Ivanov had said, had mentioned, that Gale—before the
Ananke
Gale had targeted the permanent functions of other ships, destroying their navigation systems. What if Gale had done something like that to the
Ananke,
too? Something permanent? Something crippling?
    She almost lost the unnatural sound halfway up the hallway, when it receded into the distance, and so she stopped where she was and stood and listened, backing away slowly to stand in the center of the hall. Never did the
Ananke
seem so vast as it did now, when the hallway stretched in an eternal spiral before and behind, and Althea was all alone in it. Gagnon and Domitian and Ida Stays and Ivanov were all somewhere else, behind doors locked and silent, and they might as well have not been there at all, because in that moment there was nothing but Althea and her ship.
    Althea heard the distant creak and groan of the magnets at the ship’s core, the sounds of metal and carbon shifting to accommodate the strain of such a mass, soft background noises, reassuring and familiar, like the sounds of some great creature breathing. She heard the high-pitched hum and whine of electronics, of a bulb that needed to be changed overhead. The rattle of liquid through a pipe: water, no, coolant.
    And then there it was again, that foreign sound, a rattle and a scrape like a cough in the ordinary sounds of the ship.
    It was above her head.
    Althea looked slowly up at the ceiling, where the sound was coming from, and wavered on her feet, moving with the sound, forward, back.
    It could be an error induced in the ventilation or the fuel systems, if not the navigation. But no sound like this, so physical, could be anything harmless or good.
    The sound faded, and so she stretched up as far as she could, on her toes, listening, listening—
    Abrupt, overwhelming,
BANG,
the ceiling shook, and
BANG,
the walls rattled, and Althea flinched and turned to see where the bang had come from, when
BANG BANG BANG
the walls all shook and rattled, percussive, overwhelming sound that was a physical thing beating Althea’s torso, her arms raised in unconscious defense around her head.
    Hollow, deep, metallic, the blows echoed up and down the bending hall in percussion without a pattern Althea could recognize. No one came out, alarmed by the sound, no other member of the crew came to see, Althea alone listened as her ship hacked and coughed and moaned, heartbeat out of sync, pounding wildly, and her ears were filled with the echoing of her ship’s desperation.
    There was a pattern to this. There had to be; there always was. Althea lowered her arms from around her head and listened.
    “It’s okay,” she whispered, spreading out her hands toward the walls, the ceiling, her